Where the grass was green and the girls were pretty.... No, but seriously, looking at what the MMORPG gaming communities have become over the past 20+ years, time has not aged it well that is for sure. Bring me back to the golden years!!!!
There was a HUGE barrier for entry in the 90's. Financially and mentally. It is not the culture of the gamers from 1999 that changed. Is that the masses started to enter the market. Things got easier. xbox and PS goons that had a more toxic culture and lowered expectation started to come to the PC world. More of the world started getting online. Cultures from other counties started to mingle in the pot. The denominator was being lower as more of the world came online and started to game. Cellphones connected even MORE people to the net. This changed all the culture for the worse on the net. games, msg boards, everything. The golden age is gone. What you really wish is that we still had that wall up, before the normies came.
Hit the nail on the head here I think. if you were to take the 1999 IQ and EQ of the player base and compare it to 2023 base? I'd be willing to bet it's dropped significantly. We've catered to the lowest common denominator for far too long imo.
I dunno it was different then cuz a ton of players were experiencing online games for the first time at the age of 10 to 18 and nothing was.common knowledge. These days if we don't know where something is we know google will tell us in in 1 second. It used to be about learning for yourself and feeling accomplished. Now it's who's first...
To me its this. - No maps - No fast travel - Quests were often long, tedious, difficult - Losing XP on death - No instances - Corpse runs These things WERE the game. Nowadays they would be seen as chores or bad QOL. But looking back, all of these things made the game better in my opinion. - No maps = Printing out or literally hand drawing maps, or eventually memorizing the zones - No fast travel = Taking boats and walking everywhere, exploring the zones - Quests were long, tedious, difficult = Asking friends or guildies or complete strangers for help with quests - Losing XP on death = Game immersion, getting better at avoiding death, making friends - No instances = Forced to form groups, be social, cooperate - Corpse runs = Patience, game immersion, overall feeling of real danger At least this is how I see it. The game was hard, and that's what made it good.
1. Sure, if by memorizing zones you mean running along the relatively safe zone edges because getting lost wasn't worth it. 2. or just logging in your buddies wizard/druid if you didn't already have your own 3. Begging people for hours to help you with a quest that no one wants to do because you don't have enough people yet and will probably die. But it is taking so long to find enough people that the ones you already found are getting bored and leaving 4. No one wants to do anything even remotely difficult or challenging because the exp loss is a pain and wipes out hours of work so they just sit at the same boring camp they are over leveled for grinding mindlessly on mobs that can't really hurt them. 5. Sitting in 5 hour long waitlists for the one camp you need because everyone and their brother also needs it. Or, sending in your healer friend who can get into the FBSS camp easily and having them kindly volunteer to take over the waitlist and bump you to the top. 6. Staying up well past a time when someone with a healthy relationship with the game would have logged out because your idiot pug got you all wiped trying to get your replacement there and heaven forbid you don't help with the CR.
Or worrying that all your heard earned gear will rot on that corpse you cannot reach without help and no one is available to help you.. or they get wiped as well trying to help.
I think that this is an overly pessimistic take, but it's not without some justification. I think a wave of people as you describe definitely have entered the market but that along with them came a lot of people who aren't toxic, the danger is that by painting the new generation as all being as bad as each other you miss out on a large number of probably very decent people, or rather our game does, but then it is probably not all that attractive to them right now anyway.
No one has a time machine to rewind you back to a time where you had less responsibilities, when a 3rd MMO was crazy to think about and you were more willing to put up with bad design because you liked the adventure as a whole. Stop living in the past and let your memories be memories. - It's incredible that you think being forced to print out/copy maps off eqatlas was 'good'. It was proof that maps needed to exist. Maps havent stopped people from memorizing zones. In fact, I can almost guarantee it improved our ability to remember zones. - I actually sort of agree here. Fast travel shrunk the world (like getting a car irl). But there are times and places to use fast and slow travel. - Yeah, the gnoll fang quest was super tedious. Or the Crushbone belt quest? so difficult. - I don't see the link between making friends and losing xp on death lol. All it did was force you into 'comfortable' areas or safe zones or vastly out leveled/geared zones. - Even back then, no instances was rearing its ugly head. Remember when guilds that were in tacvi/anguish were still killing Sol Ro or Fennin or some other flag to block every other guild from entering PoTime? - Tedium.
The golden years were a pain but we were younger and loved to suffer. I'm sure if eq returned to that days I would leave it and check for other game. Many of the changes eq had has made it more playable. The example is corpse runs, it punished exploration, why risk going to dalnir and die and be forced to CR if I can go to Loio and OT?
Yeah, this is way better than just downloading maps someone already created and inserting them into your in-game atlas. Why draw a map using the in-game map-creating function when you can use superior methods like crayola crayons and magic markers? /s What am I, five years old? You can still do anything you listed here just through a different method. Your solution just adds paper waste. Congrats. Yes, I especially loved traveling 30-60 minutes across the world and have the group break up right before I finally arrived. Also, how can I forget those buggy awful boats that would randomly boot me off and I'd be forced to swim for 30 minutes across OOT. Great times. /s Yes, quests were tedious. That doesn't equal difficult. Not many were. Take off those very thick rose-colored glasses and join us in reality, please. How does dying equate to making friends? Ah yes, so toxic players and guilds can grief to their heart's delight. Sadly, in my young, immature days my guild would just keep progression raid targets locked down preventing any other guild on the server from enjoying content. Such a great atmosphere, what a civilized, matured community we had back then unlike now.../s. More timesinks for no reason. Great. Nothing you listed made the game hard. Everything you listed made the game needlessly tedious and time-consuming.
Why so angry? The good ole days was about the journey of learning and meeting people along the way while having fun and tears that went with it. You couldn't even try to replace those old times or reproduce it with todays genre of gamers sadly.
Reality is harsh and people tend to see it as my personal pessimistic spin when I point it out. Not on this but on everything. I could ignore what I see or candy coat it... but that would be disingenuous. I think pessimism is fine as long as its truthful. Pessimism get a bad rap. 8-D
I'll take a P1999 with some QoL please. I can not do old school hard core classic EQ. The TLP'sa re good mix of QoL and classic for me.
